Static Executes-Before Analysis for Event Driven Programs

The executes-before relation between tasks is fundamental in the analysis of Event Driven Programs with several downstream applications like race detection and identifying redundant synchronizations. We present a sound, efficient, and effective static analysis technique to compute executes-before pairs of tasks for a general class of event driven programs. The analysis is based on a small but comprehensive set of rules evaluated on a novel structure called the task post graph of a program. We show how to use the executes-before information to identify disjoint-blocks in event driven programs and further use them to improve the precision of data race detection for these programs. We have implemented our analysis in the FlowDroid framework in a tool called ANDRACER and evaluated it on several Android apps, bringing out the scalability, recall, and improved precision of the analyses.